History of the Program

In 2020, the Office of Transit and Active Transportation at the Minnesota Department of Transportation released a request for information (RFI) on developing a regional MaaS platform. The platform would support functions like trip planning, fare purchases, and real-time updates from private and public shared mobility providers. MnDOT was aspiring for the platform to support several modes of shared mobility, including fixed- and flex-route transit, microtransit, paratransit, human services transportation, taxis, carshare, and micromobility, incorporating different open data specifications like GTFS and GTFS-Flex. [1] Over 20 vendors submitted responses to MnDOT, helping the agency to refine its approach later in the procurement process.

In August 2020, the Federal Transit Administration awarded MnDOT a $785,000 Accelerating Innovative Mobility (AIM) grant to develop and pilot the regional trip planning platform. Soon after, FTA awarded MnDOT an additional $450,000 COVID-19 Research Demonstration grant. Upon securing these grants, MnDOT issued a request for proposal (RFP) in January 2021, announcing a need for two partnerships: the Southern Minnesota MaaS Platform Pilot Project, funded with the AIM grant, and the Western Minnesota Contactless Payment Project, funded with the COVID-19 Research Demonstration grant. These projects, while using similar technology, have slightly different stated focuses. The Southern Minnesota MaaS Platform Pilot Project focuses on creating a trip planning platform, while the Western Minnesota Contactless Payment Project focuses on researching and developing contactless fare payment methods, like e-ticketing. [2]

Initial partner mobility providers for the Southern Minnesota MaaS Platform Pilot Project included Rochester Public Transit, Greater Mankato Public Transit, Brown County Heartland Express, Minnesota River Valley Transit, Rolling Hills Transit, Southern Minnesota Area Rural Transit (SMART), TRUE Transit, Jefferson Lines, Land-to-Air, HOURCAR, and Metro Transit. For the contactless payment research project, initial agency partners included Central Community Transit, Morris Transit, Prairie Five Rides, Rainbow Rider, Transit Alternatives, Tri-Cap Transit Connection, United Community Transit, and Wadena County Friendly Rider Transit. For all of these partnerships, the University of Minnesota was also listed as an academic research partner. Reviewing all the applications, MnDOT selected multiple vendors to support different parts of this pilot project:

• Cambridge Systematics as the manager for the application programming interface (API) and software development kit (SDK);
• Routematch, CTS TripMaster and TripSpark for dispatching and routing;
• Trillium for creation and maintenance of GTFS feeds;
• Token Transit for integration and e-ticketing platform; and
• Transit app as the rider-facing trip planning app.

Description: Schematic of different partners in Minnesota MaaS pilot.
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Credit: Minnesota Department of Transportation

Program Operations

Since earning grants from the Federal Transit Administration, MnDOT has encountered obstacles that prolonged the application development process. The agency initially planned to deploy a pilot for its MaaS platform in 2022; due to the time required to reach appropriate agreements between MnDOT and some vendors, MnDOT eventually launched the pilot for the trip planning platform in March 2023.

The trip planning works as such:

1. A resident or commuter in western or southern Minnesota enters the Transit app to plan their trips.
2. The individual enters trip specifications, such as their origin, destination, and travel times.
3. Depending on the app user’s location, Transit provides users with suggested routes, real-time availability and schedules of fixed-route and flex-route transit options, estimated travel times, and fares. Some agencies have deep links that allow customers to purchase their transit fares directly inside the Transit app. For several flexible or paratransit services, the Transit app provides a phone number so customers can promptly dial and call the respective transit agency to schedule their ride. Transit also allows customers to discover scooter and rideshare rides through Lime, Lyft, and Uber, allowing them to click through and book those mobility services on the respective mobile apps.

Description: Screenshots of trip being planned with Rolling Hills Transit on the Transit app .
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Credit: Transit app

Description: Screenshots of Deviated Route and Demand Response trip planning in Minnesota through the Transit app.
Click on image for full view.
Credit: Minnesota Department of Transportation

Before this pilot, each transit agency offered its own fare payment systems and were often not discoverable on trip planners. MnDOT’s facilitation throughout this process is allowing all participating agencies to integrate into a shared, modernized payment system through the Transit app and Token Transit, while also helping the agencies to develop GTFS feeds that provide open-source real-time information to its customers.

Under this regional MaaS initiative, MnDOT is also implementing the Transactional Data Specification (TDS). The TDS is a preliminary data standard that enables two or more demand-responsive transportation providers to share information about a trip electronically. If one provider does not have a vehicle or driver at the requested time, the trip request can be shared electronically, and another provider in the network can pick it up and provide the ride. The TDS enables this to be done without sending an email or picking up the phone. As the TDS pilot matures, future case studies could evaluate the planning and implementation considerations that MnDOT addressed.

Program Goals

Creating the MnDOT regional trip planner achieves different goals at once. First, the platform enables agencies to provide their customers with real-time information through processing GTFS and GTFS-Flex feeds. Creating and managing GTFS and GTFS-Flex feeds can often be prohibitive for small and rural transit agencies because staffing issues often require that these agencies contract with consultants and other external vendors. Through MnDOT’s partnership with Trillium, agencies received the assistance necessary to create these open-source feeds at no additional cost to the agencies. Developing GTFS feeds is both a positive and timely development for the agencies participating in the MnDOT regional trip planning platform; in March 2023, FTA began requiring that agencies submit GTFS feeds for fixed route services as part of their reports to the National Transit Database. [3] The participating agencies now have robust feeds that can be used in applications beyond just the Transit app due to their open-source nature.

Providing new booking and payment options through the platform contributes to the transit agencies looking to be more user-friendly. Often, fare payments and structures are not intuitive, whether customers transfer buses, pay with cash, or misplace a physical transit pass or fare card. Providing a new means to purchase fares through the Transit app provides a new level of convenience; now, customers can plan their trips in one application instead of using different sources, such as individual agency websites. While only recently released, the MnDOT regional trip planning platform provides a new digital infrastructure often only seen at large urban transit agencies. It outlines a project architecture that can be developed and replicated to agencies in Minnesota peer communities and elsewhere.

Budget and Planning

The Minnesota Department of Transportation leveraged two grants to support this pilot. First, the agency acquired $785,000 from the Accelerating Innovative Mobility (AIM) grant in August 2020. This funding source supported what MnDOT called the Southern Minnesota Mobility as a Service project, which involved creating the trip planning platform for customers at 12 agencies providing fixed- and flex-route services. [4] During that time, the Federal Transit Administration issued additional COVID-19 Research Demonstration Grants. MnDOT earned an additional $450,000 from this pool to test contactless fare payment solutions through the Transit app’s booking and payment platform. For this grant, MnDOT partnered with researchers at the University of Minnesota to “gauge public perceptions and attitudes around safety and impacts of contactless systems”. [5] MnDOT leveraged this grant to bring eight additional transit agencies to participate in the Southern Minnesota Mobility as a Service project. Successful responses to MaaS and payment technology procurements came in higher than projected and necessitated added funding to maintain the scope of the projects. With additional funding from the state, this project’s budget grew to about $2.8 million, including the two FTA grants.

Marketing and Community Outreach

Outreach and marketing for this project have been focused on providing participating agencies with materials and resources for their customers and community members. The Transit app and the Minnesota Department of Transportation collaborated to develop banner advertisements, pre-written e-mails, and social media posts that participating agencies could adapt for their communications.

Accessibility

Customers can discover paratransit services in their communities through the Transit app when planning their trips. Beforehand, customers could only plan their paratransit services by calling their respective agencies. With the integrations into the Transit app, customers can see what paratransit services are available and can access phone numbers to book their rides through the app. Transit app also provides their app in Spanish and French as well as a user interface for the visually impaired. MnDOT is working with Trillium Transit to provide GTFS feeds in Spanish, Somali, and Hmong, the most common non-English languages spoken in Minnesota. As a secondary phase of the project, MnDOT is  implementing an in-app booking option for dial-a-ride and paratransit services with Rochester Public Transit, Rolling Hills Transit, and Transit Alternatives. Customer service operations at participating transit agencies and social service providers can also use the Transit app to assist their individuals with identifying and potentially booking paratransit services for trips to medical appointments and other amenities. This Minnesota regional trip planning platform project needs not just help transit and paratransit customers but also caretakers and social service providers exploring mobility options for people with disabilities and seniors.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

Regional trip planning platforms are a relatively novel development in shared mobility. Some states like Nebraska and Vermont have experimented with similar platforms, allowing people to discover transit services that did not previously have information easily accessible. The MnDOT regional trip planning platform offers commuters across a wide swath of communities in southern and western Minnesota new information and a new platform to interact with their transit systems through the Transit app. Regardless, MnDOT has encountered significant challenges in developing and deploying the platform.

First, developing the MnDOT regional trip planning platform took longer than initially planned. Developing the platform required managing different partnerships with different vendors. Through the process, MnDOT was particular about its legal agreements with vendors, ensuring that its interests were met; with some vendors, reaching a legal agreement over their contract was a prolonged process. In addition, technology costs were substantially higher than projected, despite using the RFI to set the project budget, and MnDOT required additional funds to maintain the project scope.

Now that the platform has been deployed as a pilot, MnDOT is working hard with partner transit agencies to get customers to use the application. At this time, the adoption and use of the platform have been low due to delays in the rollout of marketing efforts. MnDOT’s Office of Communications ran into capacity limitations to produce the needed marketing efforts, and the project team decided to procure an outside vendor mid-project to handle marketing and advertising. Without wide adoption, the MnDOT regional trip planning platform functions more as a research and technical assistance project than a program directly benefiting users across rural Minnesota. MnDOT and participating agencies plan to adapt their marketing efforts to ensure broader adoption of the Transit app for the remainder of the pilot period. An expanded marketing campaign is scheduled for fall 2023.

Conclusion

Success for the Minnesota regional trip planning platform is a function of two metrics: the rate of customer adoption throughout the pilot period and the legacy it sets across the state and elsewhere. At this time, user adoption appears slow, suggesting that MnDOT and partner transit agencies should implement new marketing and outreach strategies for the platform. With broader adoption, partners can evaluate the impacts of the platform more effectively and improve the program and similar efforts beyond the pilot period.

Notably, the Minnesota regional trip planning platform establishes a framework that MnDOT and other agencies can adapt–MnDOT worked rigorously with vendors and transit agencies to ensure that all participating mobility providers developed consistent feeds for GTFS and GTFS-Flex. Moreover, many of these agencies offer customers a new means of payment through the Transit app, streamlining fare payment processing. While MnDOT is working to ensure that all participating agencies have a uniform means of booking and payment across western and southern Minnesota, the pilot suggests an infrastructure and process that can ensure that future initiatives are more robust.

Key Considerations for Implementing a Rural or Regional Trip Planning Platform:

1. What agencies and areas are you hoping to cover in this trip planning platform? Are state transportation departments or metropolitan planning organizations appropriate conveners for this type of effort? What modes of shared mobility do transit agencies and other potential mobility providers offer?
2. What resources do participating transportation agencies need? Do they already have up-to-date feeds for data specifications like GTFS and GTFS-Flex? Can other data specifications support the regional trip planning platform? Do they require technical assistance?
3. How will you fund the creation of this platform? What grants can you get from sources like the Federal Transit Administration, the Federal Highway Administration, the state level, and other levels of government?
4. What types of vendors are necessary to support the development of the trip planning platform? Consider payment technology, data specification development and support, dispatching and routing, and application programming interfaces.
5. Have you built relationships and partnerships with neighboring transit agencies to build awareness and support for the project? How will you conduct marketing and outreach efforts for the trip planning platform? How can public and private partners assist with this effort?
6. Are there community groups that you can engage in to understand user mobility needs?
7. Are you considering the mobility needs of all users, particularly those with cognitive or physical disabilities?

References

1. Office of Transit and Active Transportation (OTAT), Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT): ‘REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI): Regional Mobility as a Service Platform’, published 2020. https://learn.sharedusemobilitycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/RegionalMaaS_request_for_information-FINAL.pdf.
2. OTAT, MnDOT: ‘REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL: Southern Minnesota Mobility-as-a-Service Platform’, published January 29, 2021. https://learn.sharedusemobilitycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/1885-MaaS_RFP-FINAL-01292021.docx.pdf.
3. Federal Transit Administration (FTA): ‘National Transit Database: Reporting Changes and Clarifications’, published March 3, 2023. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/03/2023-04379/national-transit-database-reporting-changes-and-clarifications.
4. FTA: ‘FY20 Accelerating Innovative Mobility (AIM) Project Selections’, published October 22, 2021. https://www.transit.dot.gov/research-innovation/fy20-accelerating-innovative-mobility-aim-project-selections.
5. FTA: ‘Public Transportation COVID-19 Research Demonstration Grant Program Selected Projects’, published January 19, 2021. https://www.transit.dot.gov/research-innovation/public-transportation-covid-19-research-demonstration-grant-program-selected.